The Live Comedy Association reckons the UK’s live comedy sector is worth more than a billion pounds a year. This week it asked you, personally, to email your MP about it. The tool that does the heavy lifting is hosted by the Night Time Industries Association. Punch in your postcode, get a draft letter, send it to whoever happens to represent the bit of the country your laptop is sitting in. The recipient at the other end is Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. The ask, boiled down, is that grassroots comedy should be treated by government the way grassroots live music already is.<\/p>\n
That parity argument is the whole spine of the campaign, and it’s worth taking seriously before going through the asks one by one. Toomey, the LCA’s director, has been on this since the spring. A parliamentary event in May, sponsored by Liz Kendall, MP for Leicester West, was the prelude to this week’s public push. Kendall told Chortle the city’s festival has been running since 1994. She said comedy The Leicester Comedy Festival has spent the last fortnight being a case study in everything the LCA is now trying to fix. We covered the Abbey Park gig getting axed<\/a> with less than two weeks’ notice while the \u00a33 entry fees stayed where they were. There was also the unpaid-acts row from February that preceded it. So the MP sponsoring the parliamentary push for grassroots comedy support represents the constituency whose festival is currently the loudest argument that grassroots comedy needs better governance as well as more funding. Make of that what you will. (I make of it: politicians end up sponsoring festivals in their patch because that’s how constituency work goes. Asking Kendall to disown Leicester would have been a worse story.)<\/p>\n The five asks in the letter are concrete enough to actually argue about. That’s a step up from the usual creative-industries lobbying word salad. The Live Comedy Association wants comedy named in creative industries policy alongside live music. It wants comedy included in any government conversation about VAT on tickets, business rates reform, and freelancer support. It wants government-funded research into the size and economic impact of the sector. Right now the \u00a31bn figure is the LCA’s own and would benefit from someone else doing the maths. It wants the live music arena levy, the voluntary \u00a31-per-ticket scheme on shows at 5,000-plus capacity venues, extended to comedy. And it wants a fan-led review of grassroots comedy’s sustainability, modelled on the one music got.<\/p>\n The arena levy is the ask with the most teeth, and it’s also the one most likely to actually move money. The premise is that a quid off the top of every Arena Birmingham ticket flows down to the toilet circuit that produced the headliner in the first place. Applied to comedy, that’s John Bishop’s O2 dates underwriting a Tuesday night at the Frog and Bucket, a club Toomey, incidentally, also runs. Whether the arena-tier comics whose tickets would carry the levy actually fancy that is a separate question. The music version is voluntary, and it took a year of public arm-twisting to get it through.<\/p>\n The membership number is mildly confusing. Chortle reported the LCA has 1,500 members; the LCA’s own homepage currently says The pitch in the LCA’s own words, from Toomey, is the parity one rather than the special-pleading one:<\/p>\n In our minds there is no real difference between grassroots live music and grassroots live comedy. Both play an important role in supporting cultural participation, developing creative talent and sustaining local venues and businesses across the UK. All we are asking for is a level playing field.<\/p>\n Jessica Toomey, director, Live Comedy Association (via Chortle<\/a>)<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That framing is canny because it doesn’t ask Treasury for fresh money. It asks for comedy to be added to the cc line on existing conversations. VAT on tickets is the obvious one. The cultural VAT rate on theatre-ticket revenue is structurally different from how a standalone comedy night gets taxed, and if you’ve ever tried to work out which of those a Saturday at the Bloomsbury counts as, you’ll know the rules don’t make a lot of sense from the venue side either.<\/p>\n If you read the campaign cynically, it’s a lobbying body trying to get an industry-body line item written into a Labour culture brief that already has a hundred other arts groups elbowing for the same paragraph. Read generously, it’s the closest comedy has come to a coordinated political ask since the original act-support funds<\/a> at the Fringe started getting talked about as anything other than a goodwill exercise. Both reads are true at once. The thing the LCA has, that comparable bodies in other arts didn’t, is that the \u00a31bn figure is plausible at a glance, even if the next twelve months will probably be spent producing the research that confirms it, the same way a single top-tier comic’s company can sit on \u00a34.24m<\/a> in cash before anyone notices the rest of the food chain isn’t doing as well.<\/p>\n The practical bit, if you’re a working comic or a promoter reading this: the NTIA tool is on the LCA’s homepage; the email it generates takes about ninety seconds to send. If you want a different sentence than the template’s, write it in. If you want to tell your MP about the \u00a3150 prize 100 over-35s entered a competition for<\/a>, that’s a more vivid bit of data than the \u00a31bn headline. The aggregate number is for select committees; the specific one is for whichever 24-year-old constituency caseworker opens the email at half-nine on a Wednesday with a coffee getting cold next to the keyboard.<\/p>\nhelps make towns and cities vibrant places to live in and visit, and brings a smile to people’s faces<\/q>. That sentence went out the same fortnight her constituency’s festival was being publicly kicked over the Abbey Park cancellation.<\/p>\n
Kendall’s own festival is the awkward bit<\/h2>\n
The levy is the interesting one<\/h2>\n
over 1,600 members across the UK contributing over \u00a31bn to the economy<\/q>. Probably the homepage is more current and the Chortle copy is a press-release round number that’s been sitting in a draft for a few weeks. Worth flagging because if you’re an MP receiving a letter that quotes a membership figure, the figure matters slightly more than the rest of the sentence.<\/p>\n
What Toomey actually said<\/h2>\n
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Who the letter is actually for<\/h2>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n